Sweat and Wal-Mart

Let's start with yesterday, Friday August the 10th.

I woke up in a hotel. It seems like ages ago. It seems like I was never there. But I woke up in a hotel with access to wifi and an elevator and a leaky sink. The leaky sink was not a good part but I will always remember it as that damned sink that made me shave with the faucet off. I know you're thinking, "Wow, China is rough." My part really isn't but it says something that one of the nicer hotels accepts leaky sinks as fact. It's a hint. It's a thing that should tell you about all the other things I'm about to tell you anyway.

Sabrina called me around 8 or 10 or sometime. Hell, I can't remember now. We hopped a bus to the local quarantine hospital thing where "Your Care Is Our Concerns." Then I did my medical examination.

Here's how it works.

You walk into the lobby. You fill out a form that basically says, "I'm not crazy and I don't have AIDS." There are about eight to ten horizontal slots on the front of the form with pinyin and English side-by-side telling what tests and procedures you will take at each point. Then you're let loose inside the clinic like a rat in a poke-me-and-prod-me maze to complete your scavenger hunt of tests.

The first was the blood draw. Standard. My arm looks like someone punched it because there's a giant bruise where I got poked but it doesn't hurt.

The second was the urine sample. This works differently in China. You don't pee in a cup or flask and then hand it to someone. You pee in a little container that looks like a measuring cup with a spout and then you pour that into a test tube. It makes absolutely no sense other than them simply not wanting to pour the sample themselves. Therefore the bathroom is full of discarded little cups with pee splatter and the accompanying smell everywhere. These clinics are not hygenic.

I forget the actual order from here but next was blood pressure I think. I'd been in China less than 72 hours. I didn't have a phone or a way to work or a bank account (still don't have that last one as of writing this) and I had only eaten sporadically, munching on things I didn't always know of or want. So when the physician pointed to my 143/82 and said "high!" I just pretty much thought whatever. You would have high blood pressure too, lady.

Next, the neck and stomach check. Essentially, it's just groping. I had to relax my stomach and let little fingers poke me all over. Then the guy or girl, hell I can't even remember now, massaged my neck looking for explosive glands or something I'm sure.

X-ray. Actually pretty standard.

Eyesight. Wore my contacts so I was fine.

Ultrasound. Girl rubs jelly all over my stomach and then tickles me with a little proddy thing. I laughed out loud. I couldn't help it. It tickled like crazy. Then she threw paper towels on me and said "finished."

ECG. Clamp little clamps all over me and type stuff on the computer.

So all these people spoke to me in one-word English. "Sit." "Stand." "High." "Finished." They clearly learned enough English to get people in, down, up, and out but not much more. And I'll be completely racist here and say they all looked fourteen years old. It was like getting procedures done by high schoolers in lab coats. I am seriously having trouble discerning people's ages. It's this unexpected thing that's come up since I work with a bunch of Chinese teaching assistants. I know I'll have to grow up myself and get used to it but for now I just can't tell how old people are at all.

So that went fine. Unless sometime this weekend I get a call or knock saying, "Hey Ryan, there's killer evil bacteria in your blood" or "that high blood pressure disqualifies you from teaching little kids" or "you have a giganto liver full of boils." I don't know. I'm sure I'll be fine. Not worried about that.

After that Sabrina and I ate at some very westernized little restaurant that had a thirty page menu which included frog legs, pepper beef spaghetti, ham and cheese sandwiches, and (what I ordered) veggie spaghetti. I didn't use chopsticks to eat the spaghetti. Too. Hard. But I did use chopsticks successfully last night. Getting over that hump pretty quickly.

Then Sabrina turned into crazy rushing everyone lady and got Steve and I to move out of the hotel and into our apartment in like thirty minutes. With just an hour before we had to be at the office, it was no mean feat walking all our stuff from the hotel to our new place, up six flights of stairs. By the time we got to the central office, I was completely drenched in sweat to the point that everyone thought I had fallen in the river or been splashed by a car. Seriously. And the button popped off my khakis. Seriously. I must have looked like the most promising teacher they'd ever seen. Luckily I covered up the absent button with my belt and one of the directors had a spare purple button-up that fit me perfectly. I went into the bathroom and dried myself with toilet paper for ten minutes (still wasn't anywhere close to completely dry) and then went over some boring procedural things.

From there, things got better. Steve and I found out what bus to take to get to the school location. Then we found out there's a shopping mall right across the street from it. Then Kirk (one of the teachers I'm taking over for) took us to the shopping mall where I figured out that my bank card has been frozen with no way of me calling them to fix it until I get internet with Skype or something. I should have called before I flew over and told the bank I'd be in China. They probably saw my ATM stuff from the past week and went, "That guy lives in Texas!" Couldn't change my address because I have no new address to give them. Who calls their bank and says, "I'm going to be temporarily homeless?"

Anyway, Kirk lent me some money right on the spot. He's a great guy. He's actually coming over with Steph, his girlfriend, in a few minutes to give Steve and I some apartment things since that dynamic duo is ending their contract and going back to England. I've been observing both their classes and I'll miss them.

So we took the money and went to Wal-Mart. Yeah. Wal-Mart. In the mall. In Ningbo. There's also a Dairy Queen right next to the Calvin Klein store. I never thought one of the most comforting America-feeling places here would be a shopping mall. It's designed the same. It's full of the same name brand endlessness. It's full of people with bags on their phones walking in little clusters. It's the same.